Eclipse IDE for Education Project Proposal

The project has been created.

Introduction

We propose to move the IDE4EDU component from the SOC
project into this new project. The Eclipse IDE for Education is a
version of Eclipse streamlined specifically for use by university and
college students. The environment provides support for programming
languages that are commonly used in university courses, including Java,
Scheme, and Prolog.

Our initial efforts are focused on providing an environment with
reduced clutter that allows students to focus on their immediate
requirement of getting classroom work done. To that end, the current
implementation provides a streamlined Java development environment featuring stripped
down versions of wizards for creating common elements. We anticipate
that students will use this environment in their first months of
learning and then progress to a more complete Eclipse configuration.

Our next most immediate focus is to provide support for other
languages commonly used in post-secondary education such as Scheme and
Prolog (Scheme support is expected soon, pending a positive outcome from
our IP due diligence process).

Fundamentally, this project is concerned with providing an IDE specifically
tuned to the needs of students. In that regard, we view the scope of this
project to include such things as streamlining the installation and configuration
of the IDE, assignment workflow, collaboration, and more.

Scope

The objectives of the IDE4EDU project are to:

Develop and maintain a streamlined version of the Java development tools
that reduces the knowledge and understanding required for students and
other first-time users to get started.

Reduce the overall burden of adoption of Eclipse technology
for students.

Develop and maintain first-class support for so-called
academic and research languages such as Scheme and Prolog

Provide support for other aspects of the overall student
experience, including such things as assignment workflow management,
and collaboration tools.

You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send
all feedback to the eclipse.ide4edu
newsgroup.

Initial Contributions

The IDE4EDU component from the SOC project will be moved into this
new project.

Organization

Mentors

Wayne Beaton (wayne@eclipse.org)

Boris Bokowski (Boris_Bokowski@ca.ibm.com)

Initial committers

The initial committers and contributors are:

Wayne Beaton (wayne@eclipse.org) : Project Lead, Committer

Dwight Deugo (deugo@scs.carleton.ca) : Project Lead, Committer

Ian Kennedy (ikennedy@connect.carleton.ca) : Committer

Code Contribution

The IDE4EDU component from the SOC project will be moved into this
new project as a component. This code has already been vetted by the IP
due diligence process and has a mature automated build process.

User community

The intended user community is composed almost entirely of secondary
and post-secondary students. However, the streamlined environment may
have appeal in some segments of industry or for self-directed education.

Tentative Plan

The first step is to complete the move of the existing code base and
build process into the new project.

One of the main reasons for wanting IDE4EDU to be a separate project
is to better enable it to schedule releases that can be included in
packages generated by the Eclipse Packaging Project.
We therefore intend to schedule a release based on the existing code
base as soon as possible so that we can join with the Packaging Project.

The next step is to include some work that's being done on support
for the Scheme (see Bug 242444)
and Prolog languages.

This project is intended to attract some amount of research and
exploratory work. We have been in contact with the CoFFEE project about
possible integration and synergistic work. We have also started
discussions with students about extending the environment to include
functionality for students to obtain assignments, and submit their work
in an automated fashion.

Changes in this document

2009-01-28: Modified the wording (but not the meaning) of the Introduction section